When I told her that I had Indigenous heritage
she was like "how?"
"How are you Indigenous?"
Like my parents had sex?
Did she then ask for a diagram or something?
Indigenous Australians have been doing science for so long.
For longer than anybody.
It's within our culture and within our heritage to science.
So I want to take about some of the things that Indigenous communities knew
that they never really got credit for.
And one of the interesting things is moon halos.
They used moon halos to predict when weather was going to turn bad.
Firstly, what the hell are moon halos?
Yeah sure, that's a really good question
So basically this optical phenomena
where light is being refracted throught ice crystals.
So we have one stream of light going through one ice crystal.
It gets refracted so it gets bent, it gets pushed in another direction.
We get a point, we get one point of a halo.
So if this happens for a whole bunch of different ice crystals we eventually get this
beautiful ring around the moon.
They found a correlation between seeing a moon halo and there being a storm not long after.
So if you can see lots of stars between the halo and the moon that means it's low humidity
you can actually see quite well, so the rain might be a few days off.
Where as if you can't see any stars, high humidity, the visability isn't great
The storms
It's coming. You're probably being rained on right now.
Yeah.
So this is the instrumentation building.
We make instrumentations here to assist in space exploration.
Oh wow.
Jesus.
So what does what?
That's part of a satellite.
I think there's a large perception out there that Indigenous people didn't really
know anything unfortunately.
It's completely untrue obviously.
There's evidence of so many scientific discoveries that can be attributed to indigenous Australians.
Indigenous Australians knew it thousands of years before the rest of the world.
And is that because it wasn't recorded in a way where European history and academic sort of structures
sort of respond to?
I don't think so, I don't think that's the issue.
Because there is evidence and tangible evidence.
You know, there's rock art
I think the main problem is perception.
The perception of it as, you know
it's not worth looking into or it doesn't matter
There's this perception that it doesn't add anything to western science
So why would we bother looking at it?
So i'm Kamilaroi
also called Gamilaroi
So that's kind of northern New South Wales.
You grew up in Coledale?
So I grew up in Tamworth, Coledale
For a period of time your mum was on disability support
your dad worked at Coles
Do you feel like you were disadvantaged?
It's really interesting like
I definitely, comparatively? Sure.
I was really poor, I had dirty clothes, we didn't have a washing machine
Like, it was just
And kids know that, they pick up on that
"You smell, your clothes are dirty."
And kids are mean.
Yeah kids can be jerks.
Then they grow up to be jerk adults.
Yeah.
So that kind of sucked, school sucked
and I just hated school, to the point where I actually left school in year 8
You ended up hating you school, but you were the first
I believe, Indigenous woman to graduate in New South Wales with a joint degree in maths and physics
am I right?
Yes well done.
So somewhere along the line you definitely learned that you love learning.
Yeah.
When did that happen?
Learning and education was completely different from school for me.
And so I was tutored by an elder.
She would come, she was the only person I knew that had been to uni.
And she would come like every wednesday afternoon, and we'd do maths together.
And I'd learn my times tables and stuff, and it was really fun.
And so I went and did TAFE and
So by the time I had finished what would traditionally be year 9
I was doing like year 11 year 12 maths.
It wasn't until I actually left my home, moved away and started seeing other people's backgrounds
went to private schools, which is a huge thing in physics.
My background was very different.
We always talk about these people that're on centrelink and they're just doing nothing with their lives
and we fail to see that these people come from a cycle of no education, poverty
You know, centrelink is not anything, you get nothing on centrelink. It's really hard to live on centrelink.
And we treat them like they're just bludgers.
You have broken a cycle of poverty by achieving incredible academic success
How do people at home respond to that?
It's kind of two fold like there's this family being so proud and so supportive
I guess there's the other side where, I'm talking about things
like you know
I come from a poor background
Didn't have a washing machine, like all these things which is hard for family to hear
You know, that's difficult.
And then there's also people feel a bit weird when you're kind of in the lime light.
And that's very much an Indigenous thing.
You don't want to stand out, that is bad that can lead to very negative consequences.
My grandma wasn't allow to go and play on the streets with the other kids
because people might come and collect them because she's Aboriginal.
And you know, this is 40 years ago.
But that trauma persists in the mentality.
Yeah, so that metality is intergenerational trauma comes through
and it's like, okay we don't want to be visable.
So when you go out and you talk about Indigenous astronomy
Do you ever get any push back?
Like, particular discoveries attributed to people like
Galileo and Newton and Kepler
And when you have someone that has just kind of graduated and I'm young and I'm saying
"No that's not true. Indigenous people knew about it before that."
I guess it can be a little bit jarring to people.
You know, the end game is knowledge.
That knowledge should be attributed correctly
To go out there and be like "I've got some really great news
there's all this amazing information and wealth of knowledge
That's been really refreshing and really
I guess just makes me really happy.
Thanks so much for your time.
Thank you Marc.
Absolute pleasure.